unforgive me
by Empatheia
Summary: [Kanda x Linali] There are seven sins, and he is guilty of every single one of them.


**A/N: **Written for **steel popsicle** for the November round of flashfics on LiveJournal.

The Latin words at the beginning are from Dante Alighieri's _Divine Comedy_, and read thusly: _lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride._ The seven deadly sins. In the fic, they're don't follow that order, they follow the order they show up in.

Thanks, and enjoy!

**xxxxx**

_**unforgive me**_

**xxxxx**

_luxuria, gula, avaritia, acedia, ira, invidia, superbia_

**(sloth)**

Her name was Linali, and she was a girl.

Just a girl, just a small, young, pretty girl with empty eyes, tied to a bed. She didn't speak. She didn't eat unless she was fed. She never looked at anything but the ceiling, staring and staring as though it spoke to her.

Maybe it did.

Everyone said she was mad, and crazy people heard voices from things that shouldn't have them. Who was to say the ceiling didn't have stories to tell her?

She didn't frighten Kanda. Nothing frightened him, not even dying, definitely not the Akuma. People only made him angry.

She infuriated him with her steadfast refusal to acknowledge his existence. Hours he sat beside her, trying everything he could think of to make her blink, or look his way, or even make a sound beyond the slow even rise and fall of her breath. He read her stories, told her things he'd learned since coming to the Order that interested even him, things like Hebraska and the strange beings that inhabited the back rows of the library. He asked her questions about herself, where she'd come from, why they were so afraid of her that they had to tie her up, why she was crazy.

He never got so much as a change in that blank facial expression. For all she knew-- or cared-- he wasn't there, or so it seemed to him.

**(envy)**

Three days after he finally gave up, her brother showed up, his hands gentle on her restraints and eyes full of tears he would not let himself shed just yet.

Kanda watched her come to life like a river thawing and remembering to flow, awkwardly around the bulky remains of her frozen soul.

He had never been so angry in his life, and would not ever be again, not for a long time...

**(wrath)**

...not until a boy named Allen came back from a mission in Romania years and years later.

More specifically, not until he came back so broken all the Order's men couldn't put him together again, and Linali cried over his mangled, barely-breathing body until her throat swelled and bled.

Kanda had been that close to death. Once he'd taken that journey to protect her. She had _never_ cried like that over him.

He felt his face turn to familiar smooth, polished marble, cold and hard as stone, and then he turned and walked away.

He didn't really know where he was going, except for 'away,' which could have been any one of countless millions of places. Leaving was just a necessity, the where didn't matter.

As it turned out, the where his mind chose was the training room. At this hour of night it was silent and dark. His footsteps echoed quietly through the rafters.

Mugen whispered out of his sheath and settled into his palm like an old friend. Kanda set about resolutely killing shadows, since they were immortal and wouldn't run out before he was done tearing them to shreds and thus emptying this anger out through black-sharp edges.

**(pride)**

That was where she found him-- hours later, maybe days, so tired he was mindless but still ripping, slicing, _hating_.

He heard her before he saw her, felt her before he heard her. He could almost smell the salt of tears on her cheeks.

It made him angry all over again.

Why. Why for Allen, and not for him.

He wanted to asked until his throat was as raw as hers, but couldn't, because it would mean he cared and that was the one thing he'd promised himself he would never do.

As it turned out, he didn't have to ask. She told him. Still crying, as though she'd forgotten how to do anything else.

_I was supposed to protect him,_ she said. _I promised._

She didn't say who she'd promised, but it didn't really matter. Kanda didn't care anyway.

_I was supposed to keep him safe, and now he's... like this, and it's my fault. Kanda--_ She paused, wringing her hands, as though unsure of what to say next. _Yuu,_ she continued, surprising him, she'd never called him that, why now-- _I think you're misunderstanding something._

Oh, if that didn't just take the cake. He sheathed Mugen just so he wouldn't come at her with it, turned around and tightened his hands into trembling fists at his sides. _Misunderstanding what? You love him. What's there to misunderstand?_

_The how_, she replied, which mystified him until she touched his back, he turned around to ask her what she meant, and she kissed him.

**(avarice)**

She was not his, he had never presumed to pretend she was, but this... he had wanted, he really had, really coveted something he'd known down to his bones he couldn't have.

This. Not on the cheek like she always had, not perfunctory and fond, but on the lips with her hands behind his hand twisted in his hair, her eyes closed and her weight leaning into him.

Kanda was so shocked he couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't think of a single thing to say when she pulled away.

_The how,_ she repeated, _you misunderstand how I love him, and how I love you. Don't be angry, Yuu._ Another pause, her breath whistling through her throat like it hurt her. It probably did. _Please._

He had never been able to refuse her anything she'd ever asked him seriously. She probably didn't know because she rarely asked him for anything, let alone anything she really wanted, but she was now and as if his soul knew better than his heart, the anger melted obediently away.

In its place, he just felt defeated, and a tiny bit lost. What was he supposed to do now, standing here in the dark with her, naked without his fury?

**(greed)**

He'd never been able to refuse her anything, and also, he'd never been able to make himself take anything from her. But now, right now, he wanted to strip her the way she'd just stripped him, take everything back she'd taken, take _everything._

He wanted to have it all, but not for anything could he make himself ask for it, because there was a _what if_ swimming in his mind he couldn't kill. What if... what if she said yes? What if she just said 'all right' and went down with him into the darkness he'd dug himself?

He could never live with himself, that's what, but damned if he didn't wish he could ask.

_Linali,_ he said instead, _leave me alone._

And then... oh god, (he'd never believed in a god but maybe he'd start now because) she was closing the distance he'd opened between them, rooting him to the spot with her eyes and her outstretched arms, and then she was kissing him like he was going to die tomorrow.

Maybe he was. Maybe she knew something he didn't. Maybe a lot of things he didn't care about. Lots of maybes, and as far as he was concerned, they could go to hell ahead of him. He'd catch up later.

**(lust)**

She was pressing him back, stumbling together across the smooth floor like one awkward being with too many limbs, until his back hit the wall and he had nowhere left to run to.

There were tears on his cheeks, and he was fairly sure they weren't his, but they were running down into his mouth and tasted of salt and grief and her. He followed them up with his tongue, cleaning them from her face as if just that could clean up her heart too. There were some pooled at the inside corners of her eyes-- he swirled his tongue across them, taking them away, taking them into himself where they couldn't hurt her anymore.

Linali's fingers danced almost absentmindedly across his chest, his waist, and his clothes fell away into the shadows. Strange how he didn't feel any more naked now that he actually was. The undressing of his heart made him far more vulnerable than this. It didn't affect him, at least not until her fingers turned around and continued their dance across her own fastenings.

Then she was pressed up against him, pale flesh and dark hair and darker eyes, pleading with those fingers and those lips and the knee sliding up his thigh.

Kanda needed to think, needed to _breathe_, but she wasn't giving him time. All he could seem to do was gather her up, hands beneath her slim warrior-strong thighs, turn them both and crush her into the wall, sinking into her until he thought she would swallow him whole.

She made this... _sound_, and threw her shaking arms around his neck.

He buried his face between her ear and her shoulder, sucked in a great shuddering breath, withdrew halfway and sank in again as though losing a fight with gravity (which, in a way, he was). Then again. Again, and again, slowly and carefully until the sounds she made stopped sounding like pain and started sounding like something else that undid his insides as effectively as if he were drunk.

Linali-- _Linali_, the dark glowing beauty he'd stared helplessly after for more than half of his life-- put her mouth against his ear and began to say things. Some were secrets, some were truth, and some of were nothing but vocalized desire, and those were almost worse.

There were gasps and other harsh sounds spilling from him along with his breath into her hair, but no words. He didn't have many at the best of times, and now he couldn't think of a single one.

Later he would ask questions, most of them beginning with 'why,' some with 'what,' and one with 'can I.' Later he would do lots of things, selfish things, to make sure she never found the strength to walk away. Later he would pay for this.

Now, though, he couldn't form a thought from shadows and moans and the heat all around him. At a loss, he just kept going, in and out like the tide until...

Trapped between the wall and him, Linali writhed and cried out, her nails dragging painfully down his back until he was sure he bled. Her legs tightened about his hips and she clamped down on him so powerfully he thought she might be just about to squeeze his soul right out of him.

He coughed a strangled moan out into her neck and arched his spine until it shook, pushing as far in as he could go and then a bit farther, and then burst from the inside out with a flash of painful light behind his eyelids.

Together they sank to the floor, sticky and clinging to each other, unable or unwilling to say anything or think farther than a bare moment into the future.

Kanda didn't want forgiveness. He wanted _this_, this girl, this sin-ridden spiraling towards hell. He wanted her.

_Take what you want and pay for it, says God_, an echo from the past he hardly remembered.

_Fine_, he answered.

The darkness swallowed both of them, and Kanda couldn't bring himself to care enough to push her away and make her swim for the surface and the light beyond it.

Kanda was a selfish person, but he asked no forgiveness for it.

Not for anything. Not for this.

**XxxxxxxxX**

**A/N:** Hope you enjoyed it. :)


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